by James Ellroy
“Nate the Great” won his cases by outlasting judges and prosecutors and by harassing them into foolish blunders with his paperwork onslaughts. It was well known that many judges granted his minor petitioning requests automatically, in the hope that it would keep his clients out of their courtrooms and thus save them the pain of a protracted Steiner performance; it was not well known that “Nate the Great” felt deep guilt over the scores of dope vultures cut loose from jail as the result of his machinations and that despite his loud advocacy of civil liberties, he atoned for that guilt by advising L.A.P.D. officers on ways to circumvent laws regarding probable cause and search and seizure.
Thus, when Lloyd barged through his office door unannounced, he was ready to listen. Taking a seat uninvited, Lloyd outlined a hypothetical case involving a doctor’s legal right not to divulge professionally secured information, stressing that all of the doctor’s records would have to be seized, because at this point the name of the patient was unknown. Concluding his case, Lloyd sat back and waited for an answer. When Steiner grunted and said, “Give me three or four days to look at some statutes and think about it,” Lloyd got to his feet and smiled. Steiner asked him what the smile meant.
“It means that I’m an obstructionist, too,” Lloyd said.
*
*
*
After stopping at a taco stand and wolfing a burrito plate, Lloyd drove home and changed clothes, outfitting himself in soiled khaki pants and shirt, work boots, and a baseball cap advertising Miller High Life. Satisfied with his workingman’s garb and one-day stubble, he rummaged through his garage and came up with a set of burglar’s tools he had scavenged from a Central Division evidence locker ten years before: battery-powered hand drill with cadmium steel bits; assorted hook-edged chisels, and a skinnyhead crowbar and mallet. Packing them inside a tool kit, he drove to Century City and the commission of a Class B felony. The reconnoitering took three hours.
Parking on a residential side street a half mile from Century City proper,
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Lloyd walked to Olympic and Century Park East and found a uniformed custodian sweeping the astroturf lawn in front of his target building. He explained to the man that he was here to help with a private wiring job for a firm situated on the skyscraper’s twenty-sixth floor. Only one thing worried him. He needed an electrical hook-up with wall sockets big enough to accommodate his industrial-sized tools. Also, it would be nice to have a sink in which to scrape off rusted parts. The location didn’t matter; he had plenty of cord. Was there a custodian’s storeroom or something like that on the twenty-sixth floor?
The man had nodded with a befuddled look in his eyes, making Lloyd grateful for the fact that he seemed stupid. Finally he gave a last nod and said that yes, every floor had a custodial room, in the identical spot—the northeast edge of the building. Would the custodian on that floor let him use it for his job? Lloyd asked.
The man’s eyes clouded again. He was silent for several moments, then replied that the best thing to do was wait until the custodians went home at four, then ask the guard in the lobby for the key to the storeroom. That way, everything would be cool. Lloyd thanked the man and walked into the building.
He checked the northeast corners of the third, fifth, and eighth floors, finding identical doors marked “Maintenance.” The doors themselves looked solid, but there was lots of wedge space at the lock. If no witnesses were around, it would be easy.
With two hours to kill before the custodial crew left work, Lloyd took service stairs down to ground level, then walked to a medical supply store on Pico and Beverly Drive and purchased a pair of surgical rubber gloves. Walking back slowly to Century City, all thoughts of the Goff/Herzog/
Bergen/Christie labyrinth left his mind, replaced by an awareness of one of his earliest insights: crime was a thrill.
Stationed in the shade of a plastic tree on the astroturf lawn in front of his target, Lloyd saw a dozen men wearing maintenance uniforms exit the building at exactly 4:02. He waited for ten minutes, and when no others appeared, grabbed his toolbox and walked in, straight past the guard and over to the service stairs next to the elevators, donning his gloves the second he hit the privacy of the empty stairwell. Breathing deeply, he treaded slowly up twenty-six stories and pushed through a connecting doorway, finding himself directly across from Suite 2614.
The hallway was empty and silent. Lloyd got his bearings and assumed a 354
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casual gait as he walked past Dr. John Havilland’s door. When he got to the maintenance room, he scanned the hallway one time, then took the crowbar from his tool kit and wedged it into the juncture of door and jamb. He leaned forward with all his weight, and the door snapped open. The storeroom was six feet deep and packed with brooms, mops and industrial chemicals. Lloyd stepped inside and flicked on the light switch, then closed the door and loaded his hand drill with a two-inch bit. Squatting, he pressed the start switch and jammed the bit into the door two feet above floor level. Pushing the drill forward and rotating it clockwise simultaneously, he bored a hole that was inconspicuously small yet provided a solid amount of air. Hitting the kill switch, he sat down and tried to get comfortable. Seven o’clock was the earliest safe break-in time; until then, all he could do was wait.
Swallowed up by darkness, Lloyd listened to the sounds of departing office workers, checking their departures against the luminous dial of his wristwatch. There was a deluge at five, others at five-thirty and six. After that it was uninterrupted silence.
At seven, Lloyd got up and stretched, then opened the storeroom door halfway, reaccustoming his eyes to light. When all his senses readjusted, he picked up his tool kit and walked down the hall to Suite 2604. The lock was a single unit steel wraparound, with the key slot inset in the doorknob. Lloyd tried his burglar’s picks first, starting with the shortest and working up, getting inside the keyhole but jamming short of the activator button. This left the options of drilling or jimmying. Lloyd gauged the odds of individual suites in a security building having individual alarms and decided that the odds were in his favor. He got out his skinny-head crowbar and pried the door open.
Darkness and silence greeted him.
Lloyd shut the door quietly, brushing slivers of cracked wood off the doorjamb and onto the outer office carpet. He fumbled for the wall switch, found it, and lit up the waiting room. Linda Wilhite beamed down from the walls. Lloyd blew her a kiss, then tried the door to Havilland’s private office. It was unlocked. He flicked off the waiting room light and took a penlight from his pocket, letting its tiny beam serve as his directional finder. Whispering, “Let’s go real slow, let’s be real cool,” he walked inside. Playing his light over the walls, Lloyd caught flashes of highly varnished oak, framed diplomas, and the Edward Hopper painting he had seen on his initial visit. Arcing his light at waist level, he circuited the entire room,
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picking up bookcases filled with leather-bound medical texts, straightbacked chairs facing each other, and Havilland’s ornate oak desk. No filing cabinets.
Thinking, safe, Lloyd felt along the walls, stopping to read the diplomas before reaching behind them. Harvard Medical School; St. Vincent’s and Castleford Hospitals. East Coast money all the way, but nothing except wood paneling in back of them.
Lloyd slid back the Hopper painting and hit pay dirt, then slammed the wall when he saw that the safe was an Armbruster “Ultimate,” triple leadlined and impregnable. It was the shrink’s desk or nothing. Lloyd moved to the desk, holding the penlight with his teeth and getting out his burglar’s picks. He grabbed the top drawer to hold it steady for the insertion, then nearly fell backward when it slid open in his hand. The drawer was stuffed with pens, blank paper, and paper clips and a bottom layer of manila folders. Lloyd pulled them out and scanned the index tabs stuck to their upper right hand corners. Typed last names, first names, and middle initials
. Patients.
There were five folders, all of them filled with loose pages. Seeing that the first three bore women’s names, Lloyd put them aside and read through the fourth, learning that William A. Waterston III had difficulty relating to women because of his relationship with his domineering grandmother, and that he and Havilland had been exploring the problem twice a week for six years, at the rate of one hundred and ten dollars per hour. Lloyd scrutinized the photograph that accompanied the psychiatric rundown. Waterston did not sound or look like the type of man who would know Thomas Goff; he looked like an aristocratic nerd who needed to get laid. Lloyd checked the index tab on the last file, seeing that a string of aliases forced the typist to move from the tab onto the front of the folder: Oldfield, Richard; a.k.a. Richard Brown; a.k.a. Richard Green; a.k.a. Richard Goff. The last alias went through Lloyd like a convulsion. He opened the folder. A color snapshot was attached to the first page; a head and shoulders shot of a man who resembled Thomas Goff to a degree that fell just short of twinhood. Lloyd read through the entire fourteen pages of the file, shuddering when the facts of the resemblance were made clear. Richard Oldfield was Thomas Goff’s illegitimate half-brother, the result of a union between Goff’s mother and a wealthy upstate New York textile manufacturer. He had entered therapy with Dr. John Havilland four years before, his love/hate relationship with his half-brother his “salient neuro-356
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sis.” Thomas Goff was a brilliant criminal; Richard Oldfield a stockbrokerremittance man living largely on stipends shamed and coerced out of his father by Goff’s alcoholic mother, who had raised the two boys together. After wading through long paragraphs of psychiatric ruminations, Lloyd felt the blood theme emerge: Richard Oldfield’s desire to emulate Thomas Goff had driven him to undertake a sporadic criminal career, burglarizing homes known to contain art objects, acting on information from stock exchange acquaintances. Hence the Stanley Rudolph connection, obscured by Havilland’s cowardly manipulations: he wanted to surrender the Goff connection to police scrutiny, without divulging the name of his patient. Richard Oldfield’s occasional usage of his half brother’s name was what Havilland termed “cross-purpose identification—the desire to assume a person’s identity and act out both loved and hated aspects of their personalities, thereby restoring order to their own psyches, resolving the love-hatred ambivalence into an acceptable norm.”
Reading the file a second time, paying close attention to the most recently dated additions, Lloyd learned that Oldfield’s surrender to the Goff psyche was becoming more pronounced, assuming “pathological dimensions.” Goff hated women and prowled bars looking for ones to abuse; Oldfield paid prostitutes to let him beat them. Goff hated policemen and spoke often of his desire to kill them; Oldfield now aped his half brother’s broadsides. The last file entry was dated 2/27/84, slightly over two months earlier, and stated that “Richard Oldfield was assuming the proportions of the classic paranoid/schizophrenic criminal type.”
Lloyd put the folder down, wondering if Oldfield had discontinued therapy in February or if Havilland had more data on him elsewhere. He rummaged through the other drawers until he found a metal Rolodex file. Oldfield’s address and phone number were right there under the O’s—
4109 Windemere, Hollywood, 90036; 464-7892.
Lloyd sat still for a full minute, fuming at the fact that his illegal entry would destroy the possibility of ever hanging an accessory rap on Havilland. Then he thought of Richard Oldfield and went calm beneath his rage. Putting the files back in their proper place, and sorting the ramifications of the B&E, he picked up the tool kit and made for the door, thinking: Don’t let Havilland know that his secrets have been plundered; don’t give him reason to warn Oldfield, who might warn Goff. Cover your tracks. Lloyd looked at the splintered doorjamb and calculated more odds, then
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got out his crowbar and padded over to the door of the adjoining suite. Thinking, just do it, he pried the door open. Only the sound of cracking wood assailed him. He hit the next door and the door after that, then heard the blare of an alarm cut through the echoes of his destruction.
The noise grew, then leveled off to a piercing drone. Lloyd grabbed his tool kit and ran toward the maintenance storeroom, checking the elevator bank as he passed it. The flashing numbers on top said that armed help was on the sixth floor and ascending rapidly.
Lloyd opened the storeroom door, then let it close halfway. He paced off three yards to the service stairs across the hallway and closed the door behind him, leaving himself just enough of a crack to peer through. Seconds later he heard the elevator door open, followed by the sounds of running footsteps and strained breathing drawing nearer. When he saw a single uniformed guard draw his gun and step cautiously inside the storeroom, he nudged his door open and hurled himself across the hallway, pushing the storeroom door shut. There was a panicked “What the fuck!” from the guard trapped inside, and then six shots tore through the door and ricocheted down the hallway.
Lloyd stepped inside the service stairs, picked up his toolbox and hurtled down twenty-six stories to ground level. Chest heaving and soaked with sweat, he pushed the connecting door into the lobby open. No one. He walked out the door and across the astroturf lawn to Century Park East, restraining himself by assuming a nothing-to-hide gait. He was safely inside his unmarked cruiser when he heard the wail of sirens converge on the scene of his crime. With shaking hands, he drove to the Hollywood Hills. Windemere Drive was a residential side street in the shadow of the Hollywood Bowl. One-story Tudor cottages dominated the 4100 block, and the sidewalk was free of tree and shrub overhang. It was a good surveillance spot.
Lloyd parked at the corner and circled the block on foot. No yellow Toyota. Coming back around, he flashed his penlight at the numbers stenciled on the curb. 4109 was two doors down from where he had left his car, on the opposite side of the street. He checked his watch. At 8:42 the stucco and wood Tudor house was pitch dark.
He walked back to his unmarked Matador and grabbed the Ithaca pump stashed under the driver’s seat. After jacking a shell into the chamber, he walked over to 4109 and rang the doorbell.
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No answer and no light coming from inside. Lloyd pressed his face to the front picture window. Heavy curtains blocked his vision. Hugging close to the walls, he padded across the porch and around the driveway to the backyard. No car; thick drapes covering all the windows. The opposite side of the house was shielded from foot access by an overgrown hedge connected to the house next door. Lloyd craned his neck to get a quick look, glimpsing more darkened windows. Sounds from brightly lit neighboring dwellings underlined 4109’s lack of habitation. He walked back to his car to wait. Slouching low in the driver’s seat, Lloyd waited, keeping a sustained eyeball fix on 4109. It was almost an hour later that a white Mercedes pulled to the curb in front of the house. A man too tall to be Thomas Goff and a woman in a white nurse’s uniform got out and moved into a side-by-side lovers’ drape. The woman squealed as the man nuzzled her neck. Together they walked up the steps and into the house. A light glowed behind the heavy curtains as the door was shut.
Lloyd stared at the curtains and thought of the woman. If she was a prostitute, Oldfield would probably pay her to stand his abuse. But that didn’t click; her uniform and affectionate manner spelled girlfriend or pick-up. Keeping his impatience at bay by concentrating on the need not to risk the woman’s safety, Lloyd settled in to wait out the night. 18
Laughing voices and a burst of light cut across the Night Tripper’s field of vision, casting a rainbow haze over his infrared image of Lloyd Hopkins slouching in the front seat of his car. He put down the magnification lens he was holding to his eye and smiled. “Hello, Sherry. Hello, Richard,” he said.
Sherry giggled. “Hi, Lloyd.” Her uniform was a size too small and looked like it would split down the middle should she attempt anything more strenuous than walki
ng in a straight line. She sniffed back a wad of mucous and giggled again. Havilland smiled. Coked to the gills. He sized up his leading man.
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Oldfield stood with his back up against the bolted door, in a posture that reminded the Doctor of a staunch medieval warrior trying to keep demons at bay, never guessing that they resided inside him. Last night Havilland had called him to his Malibu grouping retreat and had primed him for his performance by whispering death poems in his ear while he scrubbed Howard Christie’s blood from the seats of his Volvo. The recitation had had a calming effect on them both; and now Richard Oldfield was a quiet nuclear warhead. Sherry laughed and undid the top button of her uniform blouse. Oldfield walked to the middle of the living room and said, “Ready when you are, C.B.”
Sherry giggled at the remark; Havilland could hear traces of stage fright. He walked to Oldfield and threw an arm around his shoulder. “Hold on just a minute, will you, Sherry? I want to talk to your co-star alone.”
Sherry nodded and kicked off her shoes. The Doctor led Oldfield back to the bedroom and swept an arm toward its new furnishings. “Isn’t it wonderful, Richard? One of your co-counselees helped me set it up while you were asleep out at the retreat.”
Oldfield darted his eyes over white velvet curtains shuttering the windows; his mattress removed from the bedstead and centered on the middle of the floor, covered with light blue silk sheets; a movie camera on a tripod with its gaze zeroing downward. He dry swallowed and whispered, “Please take me as far as I can go.”
Havilland embraced him, letting his lips touch his ear. “Yes. You helped me last night, Richard. I was afraid. You took me through that fear, just as I have taken you through your fears. Just one reminder. When she abuses you, think of all the abuse that governess made you take as a child. Keep your fuel intake at optimum, right up until the moment. Now wait here.”
